What You Wished You Knew Before IVF

[Anonymous]

What do you wish you knew in the month before starting IVF? After 4 failed IUIs, we are scheduled to start the process next month.

I feel like I should be doing something, but I dont know what....

[Anonymous]

How easy it was, and I wish I’d done it sooner vs wasting so much time and emotional energy on IUIs that don’t work. I am super type A, and I was so freaked out before retrieval. The meds didn’t work for me for some reason, so I was awake and fully aware during retrieval. It was not bad at all. My Dr told me that he had one patient who had to go back to work at the White House immediately after so she opted for no drugs at all. I got myself so worked up for nothing.

Also, my baby was still a week late even though we were sure of dates.

Good luck!!!!

[Anonymous]

Just wanted to add that it’s not much worse than doing an iui.

[Anonymous]

That the long stretched out protocols were a waste of time. IUI etc. And that low egg count correlates to low success rates

[Anonymous]

That no one there will ever admit you should stop. You have to have your own firm limits because they won’t ever admit that you need to move on to adoption or childlessness.

[Anonymous]

I wish I knew that failure to make blasts probably means there is a male factor infertility problem too. They will never admit this unless you have low sperm count or something obvious. Imagine doing 4-5 cycles with only 1 blast each time even though you had a decent amount of eggs. Then you start donor eggs with several different donors and you still don’t get blasts.

[Anonymous]

Just keep your head down and follow the instructions to the letter. Don’t expect a lot of hand holding and emotional support from your doctors or nurses. Frozen embryo transfers were more painful/tiresome than retrievals because of the POI shots. I hate PÍO shots.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That no one there will ever admit you should stop. You have to have your own firm limits because they won’t ever admit that you need to move on to adoption or childlessness.

+10000

[Anonymous]

That it doesn’t always work.

[Anonymous]

That the emotional toll is way harder than the physical toll. That you could be the person that has success on their first IVF cycle, but you could also be the person that still doesn’t have success after 3-4 cycles.

[Anonymous]

The health risks of pumping your body with hormones and harvesting eggs

[Anonymous]

Physically for me it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it’s incredibly time consuming and really all-consuming. You can’t plan anything because you don’t know when retrieval will be, if you’ll have blasts, if you’ll do a fresh transfer, if your FET cycle will get cancelled....

Before I started I though as long as I only have to have one retrieval, I don’t care how many transfers it takes. That was just wrong. IVF took all my mental energy.

I had success with IVF, but not before three egg retrievals, two cancelled transfer cycles, and three transfers. The cancelled cycles were as emotionally devastating as the failed cycles and the losses.

Success doesn’t instantly cure the pain of infertility. I did not feel joyful during my pregnancy— I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. And even now, with my IVF baby born, I still feel a sting when I see pregnancy announcements. Or the Tongue in cheek Facebook posts about “co-workers” doing funny things.

[Anonymous]

It really can only take one embryo. And you don't know if that will be your story. And you really don't celebrate until you have the baby in your arms and feel reasonably confident that he is healthy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Physically for me it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it’s incredibly time consuming and really all-consuming. You can’t plan anything because you don’t know when retrieval will be, if you’ll have blasts, if you’ll do a fresh transfer, if your FET cycle will get cancelled....

Before I started I though as long as I only have to have one retrieval, I don’t care how many transfers it takes. That was just wrong. IVF took all my mental energy.

I had success with IVF, but not before three egg retrievals, two cancelled transfer cycles, and three transfers. The cancelled cycles were as emotionally devastating as the failed cycles and the losses.

Success doesn’t instantly cure the pain of infertility. I did not feel joyful during my pregnancy— I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. And even now, with my IVF baby born, I still feel a sting when I see pregnancy announcements. Or the Tongue in cheek Facebook posts about “co-workers” doing funny things.

Yep. Pregnancy announcements still sting even though IVF was successful for me.

[Anonymous]

That it would work x 2 two beautiful teen DDs 4 years apart from my one IVF/ICSI